The fine folks at Carina Press are promoting me today, with some tweets and Facebook posts going up! The first of the promo tweets just went up a little while ago, and it should surprise exactly NONE OF YOU that this is what it says:
Raise Your Hand if You’re Surprised
Now, this is all very well and lovely (and in fact you should also soon be seeing a tweet go up about how I once stood three feet from Russell Crowe and my brain fell RIGHT OUT OF MY HEAD), but it occurs to me: why should Carina get to have all the fun here? I am a complex, living organism! And just like Scully once said unto Mulder, I just keep unfolding like a flower. I have LAYERS!
So starting RIGHT NOW, O Internets, I’m throwing open a brand new giveaway: spread your own promo tweets, Facebook posts, etc. about me and Valor of the Healer! The rules are as follows:
You have to link to my official site, http://www.angelahighland.com/, or use this for a short URL: http://bit.ly/Zgk7am
Or you can link to Valor of the Healer’s official page, or use this for a short URL: http://bit.ly/YQTYDm
Or, if you want to encourage your friends to jump in too, link directly to this post! Or use this as a short URL: http://bit.ly/17EIOUw
You have to share one fun fact about me! Note: this fact does not actually have to be TRUE. Tall tales are highly encouraged, in the vein of the “Chuck Norris” meme, or if you happen to be a Doctor Who fan, the “Rory Williams” one. ;D
You have to post on a social network or on your own blog or journal.
You have to send me a screenshot or a link, or tag me on your post so I can see it.
Each place you post a “fact” about me will get you one entry in the random pool of entries!
This giveaway runs from NOW until midnight Pacific time, Friday April 19th! I will choose a winner on Saturday the 20th!
I will be doing a full weekend report when I get back to an actual keyboard, but for the time being I must report that Dara and I did in fact make it to the Royal BC museum in downtown Victoria. We did not do it nearly enough justice, considering how little time we spent there. But we were killing time waiting for our hotel room to be ready, and we bailed quickly in search of naps.
I did, however, accomplish the mission of seeing their woolly mammoth in the natural history exhibit. And the corollary mission of acquiring a mammoth of my very own! The question at hand: what is this mammoth’s NAME?
I have already received several excellent nominations on Facebook, but am extending the call here. There is some debate about whether I have a boy or a girl mammoth, and whether or not the mammoth is Quebecois and should therefore have a French name. Present to me your theories, and show your work! The best nominations will be going into a poll to do my next giveaway for Valor of the Healer!
Hey folks! Surfacing from Norwescon long enough to report that my very first contribution to the Here Be Magic blog has gone up today! I’m being relaxed and groovy, and talking a bit about Valor of the Healer as well as Faerie Blood, and mentioning a few of the ways I’m shooting for equality and balance in my work. It’s no accident that both of my heroines of record, to date, are elves who are not white.
And being, well, ME, I also mention a few of the ways I love to geek out!
Come on over and say hi! I AM at Norwescon so I’m only able to pay erratic attention to the comments right now, but I’ll be trying to answer any comments as the weekend progresses and I have time in between convention programming. :)
Many thanks to my fellow Here Be Magic authors for spreading the word!
For Seattle-area locals, hey, I’m going to be at Norwescon! Not in a professional writer-type capacity, but I WILL be there, and I’ll be easily found providing assistance to Dara during the music concerts! And just in case anybody wants one, I will also be bringing my few remaining print copies of Faerie Blood. And I’ll have some special CDs as well with ebook copies on ’em, offered at a special price for con attendees! Look for me if you want either of these things, or both!
And NEXT week, of course, I will be happily boinging up to Vancouver to see Le Vent du Nord perform with the Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra! This time, I am taking the TRAIN. Because I am NOT trusting our car to be driven any farther than the distance necessary to get to and from work. And if the train should encounter any difficulties, you may rest assured that I am FULLY PREPARED to fight my way through any zombie apocalypses that may overwhelm the tracks. Because nothing, I repeat, NOTHING is going to stand between me and seeing a show which is going to look and sound a LOT like this:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-aoShC8EW4&w=420&h=315]
You may also rest assured, O Internets, that I am sternly reminding myself that no, it is NOT socially acceptable for me to shove the VMO’s piccolo player into a closet so I can steal their seat. No matter HOW much I want to see whatever sheet music they’ll be using for the evening! Likewise I will be sternly reminding myself that as this is a symphony venue, it will NOT be really acceptable to jump out of my seat and start dancing or singing the response lines at the top of my lungs, no matter HOW great the urge.
(Though I’m tellin’ ya, Internets, with inspiration like this, this is going to be a hard, hard test of my fangirly willpower!)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YwzFzrqnQY&w=560&h=315]
And at this show I’ll be seeing Susan, who, as I have expressed on previous posts, IS made entirely of awesomeness. And I’ll be staying with Geri, who is ALSO made of awesomeness. And I’ll be seeing fellow GBS fangirls Kate and Angela, with whom I have every hope of carrying out shenanigans the day after the show. Possibly also hijinx, and maybe even mischief!
Any of the rest of you who are also in Vancouver, if you want to meet up, let me know! I’ll be in Vancouver from the afternoon of April 4th through the evening of the 6th. I still have time free on Saturday for possible brunch or lunch!
At the day job this afternoon, my team’s having a little party for our lead dev’s birthday! The theme is mustaches, so there are cookies and cupcakes with mustaches decorating them. And they brought in fake mustaches (the box for which was helpfully labelled EMERGENCY MUSTACHES, y’know, for all your whisker-impairment needs) for all of us to wear.
However, nobody said how we were supposed to wear them. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a QA engineer demonstrating ‘boundary testing’!
There are days where I wish I could draw, sometimes. Because I have a picture in my head I’d TOTALLY draw if I had the time, and I’d be calling it ‘The Many Fandoms of Anna the Piper’.
There’d be a version of me right in the front with a Great Big Sea shirt, bouncing a baby version of me on her knee, only the baby’s babbling in French. And another me would have a Doctor Who scarf, and another a Battlestar Galactica flight jacket, and a third would be wearing lip gloss and wielding a stake.
A me in a Dewshine costume would be dancing her way around the circle, hand in hand with another pointy-eared version of me cosplaying Galadriel. There’d be a me with a Telgar Weyr shoulderknot on and her Threadfighting jacket slung over the back of her chair. There’d TOTALLY be a me cosplaying femme!Han Solo, knocking back a shot of the best Ardbeg she can get her hands on. And a me looking suspiciously like the one cosplaying femme!Han, only she’s got on suspenders and a long brown coat. ;D
There are laptops scattered all over the scene, as well as smaller computing devices. And every cat I’ve ever shared a house with. There are posters of the Seaview and the Jupiter II and the original Galactica on the walls. And there’s a me in the corner wielding a Swiss army knife and looking like she’s busy reassembling a functioning computer out of chicken wire, broken hard drives, and several empty cider bottles. Another me on the side would be dressed like an FBI agent, with Scully’s haircut.
And on the other side, oldest of all, would be a me with a bit of gray in her hair and an Elvis shirt, beaming kindly at everybody else.
Several of them have flutes of various shapes and sizes. One’s got the General and another got’s Ragamuffin, and another’s got my bouzouki, and anybody without an instrument has her hands up about to clap. Several pairs of feet are about to do some serious stomping. Everyone is singing. Because there is indeed a HELL of a kitchen party going on.
This past weekend, my household converged on Emerald City Comicon, along with a houseguest–a friend of mine who’d come all the way from Norway to visit us, and to attend the convention as well! (My poor friend came down with strep throat during his visit, but happily we got him treated beforehand, and liberal doses of antibiotics got him up to speed to be able to attend the convention. Otherwise there would have been SADNESS.)
Since this was my first Comicon of any kind, I didn’t really know what to expect. I’m not a huge comics reader and never have been, with the gigantic exception of Elfquest. I don’t do superhero comics for the most part, though I have a history of dabbling in X-Men from way back in middle school. These days, I am actually doing a little bit of digital comics reading, but I’ve been focusing that on the Buffy season 8 and season 9 releases from Dark Horse, as well as their Firefly and Serenity stuff. And, I’ve been amusing myself with a Star Trek run of stories adapting TOS-era plotlines to use in the continuity of the new movies. There ARE a small number of webcomics I follow as well–xkcd, Kevin and Kell, and a lovely little thing called Fox Sister.
Mostly, though… I don’t follow the big storylines from Marvel or DC. Which makes me a bit sad. I love me some superheros, but I’m hugely alienated by the ongoing sexism of the art and the storylines. So I relate a lot better to superheros as they’re depicted in excellent animation like the wonderful years-long continuity that included the Batman, Superman, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited cartoons. I’ve been consistently entertained by the Marvel movie adaptations, for the most part. And as y’all know, I adored the Avengers.
So when I went through the exhibition floor at the con and saw an endless stream of female characters depicted with enormous breasts and spines twisted in angles that NOBODY WOULD EVER POSE IN EVER, all for the sake of showing off their breasts and their bottoms… all I could think was ‘yeah, mostly? This is not art intended for me‘. I was particularly sad to see one big-breasted depiction of Phoenix from the X-Men, and another of Wonder Woman with a thong so tiny she was practically nude. In both cases, the characters were depicted with dewy-eyed ‘can has sexytimes now pls?’ expressions.
Definitely not art for me.
Happily, though, there were shining exceptions to this. One was, of course, Wendy and Richard Pini’s presence at the con. Elfquest is hands down one of the most formative influence on me as a writer ever. When I had Kiri Moth do the Faerie Blood cover, in fact, I pointed her at images of Leetah and Rayek from Elfquest and told her, “Kendis looks like the child these two characters never had.” But even aside from what my brain always insists elves should look like, the values of tolerance upheld by the lead elf characters all throughout the history of the series peal through my heart. And some of the strongest female characters I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading about have come straight out of the pages of this series.
(If you’re new to Elfquest, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It’s ALL available to be read for free on elfquest.com. GO! Go look at the pretty!)
Wendy and Richard did an excellent panel about the history of the series and what we can expect from it in the future, and I happily leapt on the opportunity to not only let my friend Yngvar buy me an Elfquest shirt at the con, but to also order two more from the site now selling them. I also ordered from the Pinis a special hardback edition of one of Wendy’s non-Elfquest works, her SF adaptation of Masque of the Red Death. This, hands down, was the highlight of the con for me.
Here’s the shirt that Yngvar got me! This is a reworked version of a design I used to have on a pale orange shirt, which had the caption “To Hunt, to Howl, to Live Free”, as I recall. Here it’s been redone to be a Comicon exclusive, and I do admit to a bit of fangirly squee to see that Wolfrider with the Space Needle in the background!
To Hunt, to Howl, to Live Free (in Seattle)
That said, though, I did also find one other set of graphic novels I want to read–a three-part series called Anne Steelyard, authored by the well-respected Barbara Hambly! This thing’s supposed to be set in an Indiana-Jones-esque timeframe, only the lead character is in fact a woman. Looking forward to diving into this, too.
And we bought pretty prints of art inspired by Avatar: The Last Airbender, Avatar: The Legend of Korra, and Doctor Who. And we saw lots of awfully nifty costumes–especially my and Dara’s friend Torrey, a master-class costumer now who’s won awards at Worldcon. We found her wandering the con in her Prince Zuko costume, again from Avatar: The Last Airbender. :D
I bought two other shirts as well–both of which were Han-Solo-themed. Just to show that there was merch at this thing Relevant to My Interests. ‘Cause seriously, this shirt? How could I NOT get this shirt?
The Most Scoundrelicious Shirt in the Universe
All in all I think I still found more to relate to at ECCC than I have to date at PAX–and I’d consider doing a one-day jaunt to future cons. People who are more in comics than I am should definitely go.
ETA: Oh, right, duh, I totally forgot to mention the other actual panel I attended–the Q&A with Jhonen Vasquez, best known for being the mind behind Invader Zim, another longstanding favorite of my household. Vasquez turned out to be younger than I expected, but also hysterical–a bit of an asshole, but in a funny kind of way. He winged it through most of his panel, given that a lot of what he wanted to talk about he could not in fact do so until a later panel that should have come first, due to scheduling mixups.
Vasquez is apparently a bit weary of mostly everybody knowing him for Zim and nothing else, and isn’t shy about letting people know that. It was, however, fun to hear him talk passionately about the console games he likes, as well as discussing some of his other work.
I got asked about this on Facebook, but thought I would post it here for the edification and satisfaction of all! If you’ve heard me speak of the wonders of cake vodka milkshakes and you’d like to try them for yourself, this is what you need to do!
You will need:
A bottle of Three Olives brand ‘cake’ vodka. Three Olives is a brand with several different flavors, and the ‘cake’ flavor is decorated with birthday-style balloons and streamers. (It tastes like somebody took cupcakes and made them into alcohol. It is delicious ALL BY ITSELF. But stick with me, my story gets better!)
A good brand of vanilla ice cream. The Murkworks recommends Alden’s Organic vanilla, but if you have other vanilla ice creams of which you are fond, by all means, use those!
Optional, if you want a chocolate milkshake instead of a vanilla one: your preferred brand of chocolate syrup. We’re using just plain ol’ Hershey’s chocolate syrup.
Milk. We favor 1% at the Murkworks, but use whatever milk you prefer!
How much to use of each thing:
2-3 scoops of ice cream
2-3 tablespoons of the syrup, to taste
1-2 shots of the vodka
1/2 to 3/4 cup of milk, to taste
Toss it all in a blender and mix thoroughly. Experiment as needed to get desired consistency.
As y’all know, O Internets, I am a big raving fangirl for Quebecois trad music. I am also NOT a native French speaker. And one of the points of vexation of being a fangirl for a genre of music sung in a language I do not properly speak (YET!) is that I desperately, desperately want to sing along with these eminently catchy ditties. Quebec trad is hugely singable–that’s one of the big things I love about it–and participatory as well. The vast majority of the songs are set up in a call-and-response structure, so you can’t help but sing along with them. At least, if you’re me!
But I can’t in fact properly sing along with a lot of the songs yet, because I can’t make head or tail of song lyrics just by listening, not yet. So it helps immensely for me to see written-out lyrics for songs I’m interested in. If I see the words, my brain is better able to understand them as words while I’m listening to the songs. I’ve set lyrics on a lot of the songs in my collection in iTunes, just so that when I listen to them on my phone during my commute, I can look at the lyrics on the screen while I’m listening.
Which means of course that I have to have the lyrics at hand to begin with.
Now, Le Vent du Nord is very, very good about posting not only French lyrics for their songs on their their Bandcamp site (go! GO LISTEN! RIGHT NOW!), but English translations as well. Actual understanding of French, I find, is optional when enjoying Quebec trad–but because I am in fact me, my language geekery is engaged. I can’t properly appreciate this music if I don’t understand the words. Plus I just love languages; I mean, I’m a writer. Words are what I do.
But not all of the bands I’m following have lyrics so readily available. In which case I need to start consulting liner notes of the albums I have physical copies for–such as all of the albums by Genticorum, about whom I have enthused before, and who are arguably now my second favorite Quebec band. <3 Last night I was transcribing lyrics of a few of their songs out of the liner notes for their album Le galarneau, only to discover that aw, crapweasels, a couple of the lines in “Les parties de Grégoire” were not actually included in the notes!
AUGH, I said. Now, with all this listening I’ve been doing to Quebec music, my ear is improving. But I’m still not to the point yet of being able to pick out more than a word or two at a time in unfamiliar lyrics. I recognized “boire” at the end of one line in question, but damned if I could make out the rest, aside from being half-sure that the first word in that line was either “tant” or “quand”.
Google Fu failed me. So it was time to invoke drastic measures: asking the band!
However, this was very easy as I follow all three of the Genticorum boys on Facebook, and one of them even supported my Faerie Blood Kickstarter, and so he very quickly filled me on the line I was missing: “T’en iras-tu sans boire?” Which means, “Will you leave without drinking?”
Language geekery engaged as I realized that “t’en” sounded a lot like “tant” to my ear–and moreover, it took me a few minutes to realize that this sentence had an unfamiliar verb construction in it! “Iras”, I realized, was the future tense, second person informal for “aller”. But there’s that sneaky “t’en” in there too. So I looked up “en aller” on french.about.com and was immediately rewarded with this super-helpful page describing the five verbs in French that mean “to leave”.
Four of these were already familiar to me, since I’d gotten them as vocabulary words in SuperMemo. But I’d been having trouble distinguishing between them, in no small part because SuperMemo gives all its spoken definitions in French, and I hadn’t managed to distinguish the various examples by ear yet. But I hadn’t gotten “s’en aller”! So this page was a huge boon to helping these verbs all suddenly make sense to me.
In conclusion: Quebecois trad music, fun and linguistically educational!
Also, go buy Genticorum’s latest record. Because they’re all excellent musicians and awesome people. Tell them I sent you!
AND OH HEY! For bonus giggles, this YouTube video over here shows a different band performing the same song. This has four additional verses at the beginning that Genticorum’s recorded version lacks, but you can definitely hear the “t’en iras-tu sans boire?” line in there!
When you do not have the words to properly express your relief at awesome medical news, screw words, go straight to KITCHEN PARTY IN YOUR HEAD! This is exactly how the inside of my head sounds like right now, people–my dream concert of ALL the awesome Quebecois and Newfoundland boys! De Temps Antan!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44BlsiQKwnw?list=PL9B03D939A9D3AE1B&w=560&h=315]
And more behind the fold! Continue reading “Because it is my birthday and EVERYTHING is awesome”
